ded generally as "theological twaddle." Nor is it
sufficient--if one would judge correctly of what the archaic Aryans did
or did not know; whether or not they cultivated the social and
political virtues; cared or not for history--to claim proficiency in
both Vedic and classical Sanskrit, as well as in Prakrit and Arya
Bhasha. To comprehend the esoteric meaning of ancient Brahmanical
literature, one has, as just remarked, to be in possession of the key to
the Brahmanical Code. To master the conventional terms used in the
Puranas, the Aranyakas and Upanishads is a science in itself, and one
far more difficult than even the study of the 3,996 aphoristical rules
of Panini, or his algebraical symbols. Very true, most of the Brahmans
themselves have now forgotten the correct interpretations of their
sacred texts. Yet they know enough of the dual meaning in their
scriptures to be justified in feeling amused at the strenuous efforts of
the European Orientalist to protect the supremacy of his own national
records and the dignity of his science by interpreting the Hindu
hieratic text after a peremptory fashion quite unique. Disrespectful
though it may seem, we call on the philologist to prove in some more
convincing manner than usual, that he is better qualified than even the
average Hindu Sanskrit pundit to judge of the antiquity of the "language
of the gods;" that he has been really in a position to trace unerringly
along the lines of countless generations the course of the "now extinct
Aryan tongue" in its many and various transformations in the West, and
its primitive evolution into first the Vedic, and then the classical
Sanskrit in the East, and that from the moment when the mother-stream
began deviating into its new ethnographical beds, he has followed it up.
Finally that, while he, the Orientalist, can, owing to speculative
interpretations of what he thinks he has learnt from fragments of
Sanskrit literature, judge of the nature of all that he knows nothing
about--i.e., to speculate upon the past history of a great nation he has
lost sight of from its "nascent state," and caught up again but at the
period of its last degeneration--the native student never knew, nor can
ever know, anything of that history. Until the Orientalist has proved
all this, he can be accorded but small justification for assuming that
air of authority and supreme contempt which is found in almost every
work upon India and its Past. Having n